A Cast of Leaders

Act Two: Add Career Development

Every Saturday morning at 10 am, the box office at the Metropolitan Opera begins selling inexpensive standing-room tickets for the following week's performances. The line for these tickets starts forming by 5 am. That there are music lovers dedicated enough to stand through an entire three- or four-act opera is inspiring. That these same people are also prepared to get up before dawn so that they can pay money to do so is vaguely disturbing.

At 5 am on their first Saturday morning in New York, students in the Duke program are dutifully waiting outside at the Met box office. It is mid-January. They have had to ride the subway in the predawn hours to get here. As the sun rises over Lincoln Center, so do their suspicions that the whole idea of spending four months going to the theater and the opera may not be the junket that they have anticipated.

During their first week at the Met, the students are introduced to "Lucia di Lammermoor "(bride goes mad at her own wedding and stabs fiancé), "La Bohème" (starving poet meets girl with bad cold), and an opera gala with Placido Domingo in scenes from "Faust," "Stiffelio," and "Carmen" (bullfighter meets Gypsy, bullfighter loses Gypsy). Unlike most theatergoers, the Duke students are not permitted simply to stroll out onto the sidewalk at the end of a performance, to utter a quick critique (loved/hated it/him/her), and to head home. Instead, Payne will take them to a nearby restaurant or apartment -- where, over dessert and coffee, they will engage in the serious work of coming to terms with what they've just seen: "What were your expectations for this work, and how were they violated?" "What values were at stake?" "Where did you see moral change?"

Payne wants his students, as part of their experience of attending the theater, to develop their capacity for critical judgment. But his deeper objective is to find out how they react emotionally to the works that they see, and through that, to learn who they are as people. "If I'm going to be a leader," says Payne, "then what exactly are the things that unite me with other people? What do I respond to? You can learn these things through your response to the arts."

"In this program, you're constantly forced to react," says Evan Osborn, a shy young man who is devoting his first few weeks in the big city to trying to grow a decent, Lower East Side - slacker goatee. "Bruce always wants to know, 'How do you feel? How do you feel?' It's a little disconcerting."

Seeing so many operas and plays in nightly succession makes the semester seem like one of those whirlwind European tour packages that promise umpteen countries in just as many days: If it's Tuesday, it must be Aïda.

"Caesar and Cleopatra" downtown. "Werther" at the Met. "Phèdre" in Brooklyn.

There is the occasional odd juxtaposition: a nude, but strategically draped, Nicole Kidman in "The Blue Room" one night; Disney's "The Lion King" the next.

Night after night, the students stare intently at the action in front of them as if cramming for a quiz. ("One thing they teach us in school," says Sasha, "is that there is a right answer.") And it's not just plays and operas that whiz by in a seemingly endless succession -- people do as well. Payne is giving his students a crash course in industrial-strength networking.

Payne is part Mr. Chips, part Charlie Rose, and part Auntie Mame. He has boundless enthusiasm -- and an inexhaustible address book of actors, artists, and patrons, all of whom he counts as friends. Each night, he carries an extra set or two of tickets, so that he can dole them out to people whom he calls "leadership-program groupies." As a result, students often find themselves sitting next to an attorney, a magazine editor, a caterer for celebrity parties, a TV producer, an investment banker, a corporate-art curator, or a composer.

Payne tells students that when it comes to shaping their futures, the ability to connect people is perhaps the most important lesson that they can learn. "People think of their career in this disembodied way, as if it were an object that you select and pursue," he says. "I've based all of my decisions in life on the people I've met. Opportunities always come in the shape of somebody, not something."

Like most undergraduates, these students have mapped out career choices for themselves that have a half-life of about 24 hours. They are going to be lawyers, they say. No, make that psychologists. Wait a minute, teachers. Some swing back and forth between Wall Street and Madison Avenue, as if they were throwing darts at a map of Manhattan. The most popular career choice is Not Sure, followed by It Changes Every Day.

Payne often arranges for actors and other artists to sit down with students to discuss the decisions that they've made in their lives. Most frequently, what the students hear is that these artists didn't choose a career -- the career chose them.